 Now we are pleased to welcome Regina Sipos who will be talking to us about not reinventing the wheel constantly within the community space. So Regina, thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much all of you for being here. A disclaimer, I'm not a community manager whatsoever, so I hope it's still going to be fine. This is the slide that you do not have to read. What I wanted to start with is the Social Digital Innovation Initiative that I'm going to be referring to tonight, a German non-for-profit company. And we are basically a traveling circus, which is important for you to know because it's going to be very important for our community. Traveling circus means we piloted in Berlin last year, then we were invited to... Oh, then... Yes, like this. So that's actually for the microphone is for the live stream? Right, yeah, okay. The traveling circus. We piloted in Berlin last year and then we were invited to Hungary to run our program, which you're going to be learning a bit more about in a second. And this year we're actually planning on running programs in the Adriatic region and in Brazil. What we do, these programs, are open collaborative processes and the idea is to help cross, pollinate, basically tech and social initiatives. What we try to do is not to replicate existing infrastructures, such as networks and groups of local people or co-working spaces, things that would normally be relevant to our program, but we think that we can also source these from other people. The idea is that we do not want to duplicate existing things. What we do do is we build bridges for collaboration between open source technology, be that software or hardware, and social innovators. And we help them develop sustainable and impactful projects together. We teach them social business skills. But before I go ahead with that, there is one thing that I want to clarify. When I say social entrepreneur or social innovator, the person that I mean is not the one in this hat and with the cigar. It's a person like Kate who works in Kenya to help local craftwomen basically get online and sell their jewelry to people around the world without being ripped off by a middleman. She is the one who creates the e-commerce platform and she is the one who trains or by now her team who helps these local crafts women take good pictures and then also upload them. The major difference between the dude on the right and this woman on the left is that Kate actually has a cooperative approach instead of a competitive one. And this is also important for me to point out when I say social entrepreneur or social innovator, I don't actually mean something like a social network. What I mean is that these people are working to improve the lives of their communities or humanity as an entity. So we teach these people business skills, social business skills. Those look slightly different from actual business skills. There's a triple bottom line. I could go on for hours about this, but that's not the point. One of the things that we always point out is this concept that Ashoka has developed, a foundation working with social entrepreneurs called the smart network. And the idea of the smart network is that it depicts an evolution of cooperation as we know it. Basically what happens if you move your ego away from the center of your activities and put your vision in there and try to develop networks, collaborations with others and grow your projects which are for social good through that. And through the smart networks, we believe that people can work much more efficiently because everybody is doing what they are best at. And they leave the tasks that they are not very good at up to others. And so this is why today I want to talk to you about setting up communities in more of a critical way. Because if we ourselves, when we are supporting social projects, we actually ask them and teach them that they have to cooperate, then maybe we should be doing the same thing with our community platforms too. I'm sure this has already been discussed today a million times, there are different types of communities. When I say community, I think of the communities of interest, people with specific knowledge on a certain topic. And so what worked? Why when we started our program last year, we were cocky enough to say, oh yeah, we can set up another community platform. My colleagues and I have worked for a very long time for an agency of the United Nations. It's called the ITU, the International Telecommunication Union. And so our platform that we set up there had 18,000 people worldwide growing in the first couple of years. I'm pretty sure that we could have even improved these numbers further. They were actually coming from 180 different countries. The reason why it worked, that platform for us, is because when we set up the platform, we kind of launched it with a huge global event. And we built the beginnings basically on a data set, a list of emails of people who have already participated in different competitions that we had organized before. We knew that this platform would be relevant for them. There was also this aspect of continuous engagement on the platform because every year we announced four to five challenges to which people could apply. And these were broad enough or open-ended enough that they did attract a lot of people. We also had quality content coming from different mentors. So people had a reason to check back, often enough to find something, a little treat on this platform. And the other thing that helped was that there was also a gamification aspect built into this platform. So people who have applied to these challenges could get points when their ideas were voted upon. And so there was this incentive for them to invite people, their friends, vote on each other, and basically just work together. And so the adaptation went fast, really, really fast. Probably also because it was the UN and a lot of people would like to have this stamp of approval on their projects. But also because people generally, I think, like to share their ideas and their views. And I think, of course, also part of it was because if you want a challenge, you could actually win a free trip to somewhere nice. And so what did we learn last year when we tried to set up a different platform and why it did not work? When I left the ITU, I decided to launch this SDI project, the Social Digital Innovation Project. And as I said before, the nature of our program is that we don't really actually want to build anything that is already out there, simply because we think that it is a waste of everybody's time and energy. We also, our city or at the max, country-level engagement is more, if I may say so, one-off. So we go somewhere and we run these events, bring people together and incubate a bunch of them. But then we're basically out of there. This should change soon when we are going to be developing our legacy program, basically inviting trainers to learn how the whole thing works and then run it after we're gone, completely separate from us if they don't want to be part of it anymore. But we actually also, I have to say that we did not have the right capacities to really bring a good community together. We're also going to have a bunch of knowledge products that we're working on, even if these are already CC attribution share-like. The problem with that is that even though these are going to be collaborative at some point, at this stage they're not. And so why will we, even if we can say that we can work without a community platform, why do we want to have one at some stage? We would actually like to build, continue building these bridges. And currently there's no other platform where the two target groups that we're working with are truly present. The two target groups being the techies and the social entrepreneurs or social innovators. We also want to, of course the most important point of this is cross-pollination. So the idea that both communities can actually work from each other, learn from each other and work together with each other. We would also like to make sure that all the knowledge that people are sharing, all the ideas, everything that the mentors bring in throughout the incubation program is actually collected and collectively also worked upon somewhere. We're definitely looking at turning these into open educational resources. And we might as well just start out with a wiki. It's perfectly fine. We also need this, or we'll be needing some sort of a platform in the future because when we're talking about these local communities, it is very, very important for them to actually be able to work together with global communities. And these global communities also will want to have an effect on these local communities. However, for people to be happy with this platform, something that we will definitely want to make sure is that they feel like they belong to this community and that they have this sense of security and trust, which I'm sure also is often mentioned when talking about online communities. And so we also are going to develop or have to find ways to develop incentives for people to check back every day or as often as possible. And so for coming to this platform to become a habit, so to say, and maybe part of their identity. So for us at this stage, the question would be whether are there any tech community platforms out there that would be interested in having more social innovation going on in their community? Or are there any social projects that would, or places gathering social entrepreneurs who would like to see more techies in the discussion? I have to say about the second one is that they're generally not running these communities on, well, they're running them on popular proprietary platforms, which is definitely not an option for us. So we would have to stay with the stick with the first version. And so for us, because of the nature of our program, it would also of course be very important that if we find a community to cooperate with, these people would have to have a strong user base in countries where we are actually going to be active. So it really doesn't help us if there's a completely active community in Japan if our program gets funding for Brazil. So tapping into existing ideas, especially based on what I said about smart networks, letting other people do what they do best, it should be a great idea and a really good advice to ourselves. But the big question is which communities could really benefit from us of having our program on their platform, right? Because one of the main ideas of the smart network theory is that it definitely has to create win-win situations for both all three, all of the parties that are involved in this. So generally, we are looking for platforms that have very active physical, local groups. But it's also very important for us that these platforms also need to be looking for more activities for their members to engage in. And so the ones that we have looked at, they're already in the social tech scene. This is how we also got in touch with them. Mainly looking at the OSCE open-source circular economy days and edge riders. OSCE days being a more community and activity-based and edge riders being on the more of the social side, more of a think tank. But the third thing is that I wanted to tell you about a little bit today is EnVienta. It's a project that's based in Hungary and also in Spain. And we got the chance last year to incubate them. They are actually thinking or, well, working very hard already of setting up a platform that encompasses a bunch of different tools and tools that people could use. One is a community platform, an anti-Facebook kind of thing where you could say so many people are working on that already. The other interesting thing that they're working on is an open-source hardware, cryptocurrency-based crowdfunding platform where the interesting point is that we could actually really contribute to it because what people are looking for when supporting a crowdfunding campaign is they would actually be very interested in actually getting whatever they're supporting. And for that, these teams have to have some sort of an idea of how they're going to deliver. And that's what we're good at. That's what we can do. So I thought that I would bring this as an example of how people can work together and basically just help each other with whatever they are doing best. So to start concluding, because this day has been very long for all of us, the platform, the audience, and also the value proposition to your audience has to be a very, very good fit for it to work. And with this smart network theory, I think we can say that the whole can actually be greater than the sum of its parts through collaboration and through cross-pollination and everybody doing the things they are best at and leaving up to others what they are much better at. What worked for us in the first round was starting with a big engaging event. But I think in the long term, what can also, of course, work is being patient and slowly building up the community. And something that you definitely already know is finding ways to not to have hierarchies, not to have top-down management, but still good community management in your community and to create incentives for people to actually stay in the community and come back as often as possible. So at this stage, I also would like to turn this into an open call. If you have any ideas where we could be useful for a community that you know about, then definitely let us know. For chat, you can write me on my first email if collaborations, any ideas come up, then I'm available on the second one. And any kind of academic ideas can go to the third. You can also find me on Twitter. And one last thing before I finish. As I mentioned, we are actually going to be starting our next incubation cycle very soon in the Adriatic-Ionian region. So if you know anybody who could be interested, then definitely send them our way. Thank you. Yes, who funds the incubation program? Or where do we get funding from? Being a German non-profit company, we're actually eligible for funding from German foundations. And I think that that's really the safest way not to be involved in any kind of money that you don't want to be associated with. Sorry, excuse me, yes? So you say that everybody should do what they're good at, but isn't that discouraging people from learning new things at the same time? Yes, of course. Sorry, the question was, if everybody's doing what they're best at, isn't that discouraging people from learning new things at the same time? Yes, of course. This was cut very, very short. So, no, I completely agree with you. I really think that what you're interested in is definitely something that you should learn to do and be as multifaceted as possible. But try to learn from the best that would definitely be something that I would recommend. Another version of this talk is that? Excellent. If you check it out, I'll make sure that we can get it. Great, thank you. If you have one more question only, and then we're going to welcome Mike. I'm going to say you, not my call, but I'm going to say yes. How do you contact or how do you get contacted by the social entrepreneurs? How do we get contacted by the social entrepreneurs? We actually do work together here, again, smart networks. What we do is work together with local partners. In Berlin it was easy because I already lived in Berlin, so I had a lot of these networks. What we did in Hungary is we had a couple of really, really good partners who already did this legwork for us. So I think that, again, your best bet is going to be instead of trying to set up another chain of information, try to get to the right people, work with the ones that are kind of the usual suspects anyway, and then work from there. It was more general entrepreneurs. Yeah, so through this link and our website, there is an open basically forum so anybody can reach out to us, and then we get back in touch.